sergiosantos.info

blog and works

Hyperlink's web visualization

30.May.2007

A lot can be said about the importance of hyperlinks. It’s certainly the most used Internet tool. Even now websites are rated depended on the number of external links that point to them, like Technorati’s authority ranking. When you try to follow the link’s path you usually find that it creates a sort of web of hyperlinks, and this is better observed in the blogosphere, since a post usually comes from a source of inspiration and doesn’t contain all the information, linking to other places where a specific topic can be found in better detail. This web can be used to determine the interests of a specific group, to demonstrate a demographic change or, like mentioned above, to sort the relevance of a source.

mvblogosphere is an attempt to track, map and analyze the exponentially growing Maldivian blogopsphere. The information is gathered from a big list of Maldivian blogs, and the links and keywords of each post are processed. The result is presented in a rather artistic form, creating visual forms of this information. You can see some of the experiments made with simple lines representing the connections between blogs, generating different types visualizations. The place a blog has in a specific image is usually determined by the amount of links it creates and gets. On the visualizations by radius distribution, the most quiet blogs are easily spotted.

Some of this kind of information can also be gathered from sources like Digg topics, Flickr tags or search terms on Google for example. But even this kind of data depend on the ability to connect itself with other portals. Once you understanding its potencial, you can have the world’s best tool for demography studies.

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